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School tech programs get into 3-D printing

GHS teacher Matt Merfeld looks at the train engine he wants to print on his computer.

One wanted to hear Goldendale High School (GHS) teacher Matt Merfeld speak to the machine in front of him and say, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." Then, one might imagine, the 3-D printer would print out that hot beverage for him, just like Captain Pickard used to do with his replicator on "Star Trek: the Next Generation."

Neither happened in Merfeld's classroom last Thursday, when he demonstrated the use of the two 3-D printers at GHS. But what the printers can do is indeed a not-so-faint foreshadowing of things to come.

"They love it," Merfeld says of his students and their interaction with the machines. "If they look at a diagram for a piece of something they're building"-Merfeld shows a schema...